1 Easy Tip For More Chest Growth

Today I want to share with you one easy tip to help you start seeing more overall chest growth. Now, I’ve made tons of videos and articles on chest growth already, so what makes this tip any different than what I’ve already taught you? Well, a lot of my other chest content will cover certain parts of the chest like how to get more emphasis on the upper chest or lower chest or inner chest, all these areas you’re trying to grow.

But at the end of the day, your chest is going to grow the more times you train it and the higher the frequency of your training. The more intense your training is means your chest WILL grow. So chances are if you’re still having a hard time growing your chest, it’s because of this one simple thing that you’re not doing.

More Volume!

The tip I want to share with you is you need to start incorporating more volume into your workouts, meaning the amount of work done in a workout, such as sets and reps. A really easy way to incorporate more volume into your workout without having to drastically change it is to start doing things like drop-sets or supersets on every single exercise that you’re doing. For example, if you were barbell bench pressing or dumbbell bench pressing, you would do a drop-set where you drop the weight up to two or maybe three times max, in order to get more volume fused into one set.

Drop-Sets

For example, on a drop-set of dumbbell bench pressing, I would grab the 85lb dumbbells (or as heavy as I can depending on if I have a spotter) and bench them at least 8 – 10 times. As soon as I finish those 8 – 10 repetitions I’m going to drop the weight, grab the 60lb dumbbells and bench them for 8 – 10 repetitions, really pushing through the set, definitely struggling by the time I get to reps 8, 9 and 10. Then as soon as I finish that set, I’m going to drop it one more time to the 30lbs dumbbells and then I press those for 8 – 10 repetitions.

The intensity of the last set feels just as heavy as the 85lb dumbbells did in the beginning. Why? Because you’re doing a continuous set of reps, you’re obviously fatiguing and you’re getting tired.

So you’ve essentially tripled the amount of volume in one set by doing this drop set. I feel like a lot of you go to the gym and you don’t have any issues loading up the weight when you train chest, right? Think about your workouts, you’re always going to the gym trying to lift as heavy as you possibly can. So think about that when you think about the fact that you’re not growing – what’s the key ingredient here? It’s volume and metabolic stress. Remember there are the three muscle building mechanisms: mechanical tension, metabolic stress and muscle damage.

If you’re overloading on your weight you’re getting that mechanical tension and now you’re causing some muscle damage. But if you infuse that third one, metabolic stress, where you’re doing more work in less time with zero rest, that’s going to cause a lot more damage to the area, send a lot more blood to the area and it’s going to increase the intensity of every single set you’re doing and this is very important.

Supersets

Now, if you can’t do a drop-set of you don’t have a spotter to help you through those reps, or maybe you’re just in a situation where the machine you’re using or the dumbbells available to you really don’t make sense to do a drop set or you can’t lift that heavy, what I used to do when I was young when I first started training is I would actually do a set of push-ups until failure in-between every single set of bench press as a superset.

Again, I’d grab the 85lb dumbbells then as soon as I was done, I’d throw them to the ground and then I would jump on the floor beside the bench and do push-ups until failure. What’s really great about doing push-ups until failure is that as you’re going up and down, as soon as you start to fatigue or you can’t do any more (maybe you can only do five or six repetitions because you’re so tired and you’re on your third, fourth or fifth set of the exercise that you’re doing), you can easily drop to your knees and squeeze out four more, maybe five more repetitions because you’ve cut your bodyweight in half.

Effective Reps

There are a lot of people who talk about effective reps, such as when is a rep actually effective. For example, when doing a set of 10, are all 10 repetitions effective or is it those last five or six repetitions that are most effective because you’ve pre-exhausted the muscle and now you have to dig deep and get stronger contractions in order to be able to continue the workout. That’s basically what is happening with the drop-sets and the supersets.

As you start to approach failure and maximal muscle fatigue, you now have to dig real deep and push real hard and you’re going to feel parts of your chest lighting up and getting pumped that you’ve probably never felt before. That’s a good indication that you’re activating more of your chest per set.

Conclusion

To recap, start incorporating drop-sets or supersets (or both!) into your chest workouts as an effective way to basically double or triple the amount of training volume that you’re doing in that workout. Then obviously start adding multiple growth periods by training your chest maybe two to three times per week, rather than just once per week. If you’re doing a five day split and you’re only training your chest every Monday, that’s only one growth period out of seven days and it doesn’t restart until the following Monday, whereas if you add another chest day in on Wednesday or Thursday, you’d be very surprised as to how much that actually helps!